The proliferation of email messages has been accompanied by an increased burden on a professional's time, yet the time spent in reviewing and responding to emails is not being efficiently captured in time entry programs, if captured at all. Increased use of mobile email platforms has exacerbated this problem because time entry is not convenient and sometimes is not viable when away from one's office.
One popular time-entry program called Distributed Time Entry (“DTE”) Enterprise is available from Advanced Productivity Software of Atlanta, Ga. DTE Enterprise integrates with leading time and billing (i.e., accounting) systems to streamline the accounting process, yet there remains a deficiency in that tools remain needed in the art to assist in spotting or identifying billable events in the first instance. The DTE “InHand” product supports time entry on BlackBerry® smartphones, but this tool merely validates entries and provides timers in the same way as has been done for years using desktop applications—with the user manually indicating that there is an event to bill.
Existing time-entry processes remain independent of email and other document management systems. One tool that is useful in gauging productivity is included in the Microsoft Office® suite of programs and is know as “Journal.” Journal can track time spent on particular emails and documents, but does not construct a record that is useful in accounting or financial programs, nor does it perform the work to associate it with particular billable reference information. Rather, Journal is a historical log of what was touched and in that respect is a useful forensic tool for understanding how time is being spent on a computer.
A conventional arrangement of a mail system, a document management system, a time entry system, and an accounting system of an enterprise is illustrated schematically in FIG. 1. Each of these systems typically is accessible within a network. One or more mail servers 110 support standard communication protocols (e.g., SMTP) and are communicatively coupled to external networks. The mail servers receive and distribute emails including those that contain voice mail to desktop and mobile mail clients 120, 130, each of which is associated with a particular username. The mail servers can have additional functionality such as virus checking and centralized spam removal. The emails and voice mails can originate from within a local or wide area network of the enterprise or can originate at locations across a global distributed network such as the Internet. A telephony system 100 integrated to the enterprise's network in a conventional manner can carry telephone signals and voice messages in digital form.
The emails received by and sent from a given user remain in that user's email program unless moved to a public document management folder 150. To the extent that billable effort is spent in reviewing or responding to an incoming email or in connection with composing an outgoing email, the user ordinarily creates a time entry to capture that event in an accounting system 180. To do so, however, the user must identify the party to be charged and create the time record, which in turn typically requires interaction with a separate time entry application 160 and an enterprise database 170. In addition, a typical policy of many enterprises is to keep a copy of emails outside of the email program; however, such policies are frustrated because they create a burden on users to identify the appropriate path to which the file is to be saved and manually move or copy the message. That can be monotonous when many emails are involved and are to be filed in a great many different paths.
With respect to telephone calls, a timekeeper ordinarily records that event in a time-entry program, but the responsibility for doing so rests with the timekeeper and if the record is not created within a short time after the call, the event may not be billed at all amounting to a lost revenue opportunity. This is particularly keen when the timekeeper participates in a call while on a mobile phone or while not having access to a time-entry program.
Existing software has not automatically created time record entries based on heuristic analysis of messages, other electronic data and metadata, nor has any known system provided tools to assist a time-keeper in reviewing and importing such records from outside of a time-entry program into such a program. Moreover, with the advent of the present invention, new record management tools are needed to more effectively manage and audit automatically constructed time records for approval prior to entry into or release within a time entry program. Likewise, emails, their attachments, and other electronic documents must be properly filed within a public document management system, and yet heuristics and heuristic modules have not been deployed to address this problem in a practical way, particularly in conjunction with the concurrent creation of automated time-record entries. The present invention addresses these and other needs in the art of timekeeper record creation and management.